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ROLLING THUNDER

Prologue

Medano Beach, Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

“Una cerveza para el poquito diablo,” quipped the bartender in a friendly manner, smiling as he placed a sweating brown bottle in front of the patron who looked like quite a collection of possible things, but none of them approximating a devil, big or small.

The patron smiled back. It was a private joke.

He picked up the bottle and gingerly moved its lips to his own, took a quick drink and placed it back on the counter. His eyes were cast far away, beyond the bar and oblivious to other patrons, of which there were a good few already staking claims to stools set along wooden countertops beneath the palm-frond roof that, together, largely comprised the simple but nevertheless popular drinking establishment. Barstool legs dug into beach sand underfoot, staunchly resisting efforts to be moved or dislodged. Things didn’t change fast here.

He watched the distant surf as he’d done daily since his arrival. It changed little from day to day, and less from hour to hour, but somehow there was no limit to his interest. Watching it was something he could do as an abstraction to matters lingering deep within his own mind awaiting careful inquiry whenever he summoned sufficient courage to face up to them, or as the entirety of each moment, his mind somewhere amid the finite space that began a couple hundred yards out on the horizon where the waves first bared their silky shoulders, and terminated mere inches away at the promising bronze lips of a Dos Equis bottle that presently defined the inner marker of his conscious thoughts.

“Little devil,” said the woman seated beside him. “Perhaps I’m not safe.”

He heard the comment enter his world and his mind rode one of the waves all the way to the beach and then walked leisurely up the sand until it finally rejoined his corporeal self. There was no hurry.

“He says that every time.”

“Is that your reputation then?”

“Only at night, and really only with children. But I suppose that doesn’t sound any better.”

“Quite the contrary,” she said, nevertheless unconcerned for herself. “There has to be a story. How does it go?”

“Alright,” he said. “Since you asked, the short version is that when the puddle jumper dropped me down here at the airport I found myself standing at the curb with a bike box and a duffle bag, and not a taxi anywhere. There was, however, a questionable looking old guy with one eye and a rusty motorbike who offered to deliver my stuff and come back for me. I was okay trusting him with my luggage but not with my ass, so he showed me on a map where my cabana was located and it looked like an easy twenty mile ride along the beach road, so I unboxed the bike, changed clothes, gave him twenty dollars and my stuff, which he secured to his motorbike with a roll of duct tape.

“It wasn’t as simple a route as it appeared on paper, and I got lost and before long it was getting dark and the winds were kicking up as a thunderstorm I’d been watching out over the ocean seemed to be heading ashore where I was supposed to be.

“When I finally got to town all hell broke loose; rain pelted me from all angles and I had to fight a whipping wind just to stay upright. It got pitch dark and the roads ran with streams of warm muddy rainwater, so I couldn’t see the potholes and simply stood on the pedals and rode through them. Lightning fired off like falling tree branches set afire around me, and against that apocalyptic backdrop I guess I looked like some bigheaded devilish apparition floating into town.

“A family leaving a restaurant in all this mess stood at the curb studying how to ford the river the street had become, and I came over the crest of a hill headed their direction. Even through this maelstrom I could hear the kids screaming and before I got to where they were their parents shooed everybody back inside while they waited for me to pass and to see what in the world I might be.

“As I went by they saw only a miserable bicycle rider and the ‘devil’s cloak’ was nothing more than my rain poncho torn and flapping wildly in the wind. The next day, I came down here and Pancho there starts calling me Satan.

“So are you sorry you asked?”

“No, I suppose I should be relieved,” she responded. “You think your being wrapped like King Tut’s mummy had any role in this misunderstanding?”

He glanced about himself; unsure whether he’d overlooked whatever she was referring to. The bandages. The wraps. That night they’d become disheveled and noticeably blood stained as a consequence of that long hard ride. He shook his head slowly from side to side, amused at the otherworldly vision he must have presented.

“How did you get so banged up anyway?” She asked. “I’ll go out on a limb and wager it involved a bicycle.”

She took a sip from the Margarita she appeared to be babysitting; more coddling and looking at, than drinking.

“Yeah, I got scraped up good a few weeks ago. It’ll all heal. Nothing broke that hadn’t been broken before.”

“Still looks unpleasant,” she noted.

“This stuff always looks worse than it is, and I’m used to scrapes and bruises. It goes with the job,” he said. Though he didn’t explicitly say what that job was, he trusted it didn’t need explaination.

After a few moments, he added, “It’s a matter of perspective, I suppose.”

“How does perspective make that hurt any less?”

“It doesn’t. But it helps you remember you’ve gotten over worse.”

“Like how much worse?”

He turned and looked at the lady, who appeared fifty-ish with a pleasant face and wavy strawberry hair she’d put modest effort into disciplining. She wasn’t a show-pony, and the look he saw in her eyes convinced him her interest was genuine and nothing untoward would come from whatever passed between them sitting there that day.

“Well,” he said, turning slightly on the stool and tugging up at the bottom edge of the jersey he wore, lifting it up off his hip and raising it to where his ribs became visible. “This was worse,” he said.

She stared at the scar that started an inch from his spine and ran horizontally in a wide pinkish-gray line just above his hip bone and around his torso to his stomach, finally running to ground half way between his hip and his navel. The scar wasn’t the result of a simple cut, either, so much as it evidenced the upper and lower parts of his body had been nearly cut in half, then sewed back together by a person competent at such things.

“Dear lord, I’ve never seen anything quite like that,” she stated, still staring at the fleshy ellipse. “You get that from the bike also?”

“No, this one’s a different story altogether, but I’m a better rider for it. That’s the truth.”

The statement was honest but he knew when he said it he’d baited her to ask what the riddle meant, because it took a story to explain and he felt in a mood for telling his. He could chalk it up to his Irish roots and his ancestors’ prolific gift of gab, traits carried in his own genes, or he could ascribe it to a human response to loneliness and the need for connections so as to reassure one’s self that one did in fact exist and matter and have some minor influence on the order of things in the world. Perhaps these were the same but for the words.

“You look like a Houdini trick that didn’t quite work,” she coaxed.

His response came unhurriedly. First there was another pristine wave rising out on the horizon to be ridden by his eyes, and then warm white sand to be crossed in his mind in slow and easy steps.

“When I was twenty,” he said, “I was a reasonably promising rider racing with a team in Colorado, where a lot of top U.S. cyclists call home. My dream was to win enough races that I would get picked up by a European team.

“I ate, slept, and lived cycling. I put in a hundred miles every day while eating like a bird to keep the weight off. I’d ride any race in any weather, sometimes finishing with my body temperature several degrees below normal, hypothermic. It was about suffering day in and day out, but it was also about as much fun as one could ask for. Responsibilities were few. People paid my expenses and took care of me. Aside from five hours a day of fitness work, the rest was mine to sleep, play video games, surf the internet, or just goof off with my mates.

“One day we loaded into vans and we set out across the country for the U.S. Pro races in Philadelphia. At the time, it was the biggest event in the U.S., and the best chance to earn an invitation to ride for in Europe.

“I’d been holding my own all season, but I wasn’t exactly blowing doors off their hinges, if you know what I mean. But I was hopeful for a good showing.

“As was often the case, there were a number of amateur cycling events scheduled before our race. Until these events finished, I had time on my hands, so I got my bike out and spun around making sure things were properly adjusted, and mostly just watching the festivities.

“Someone got up on stage and spoke to the crowd of athletes and spectators about how the money from the amateur events would go toward paying medical expenses for a little boy suffering from some form of cancer. The lad’s dad had been a local police officer who was killed on duty earlier that year, so his mum was shouldering all this.

“She and the lad came on the stage, and I was struck by the extent that their life was the stark opposite of mine. They had so little, and needed so much.

“So the boy’s mum discusses all his chemo treatments and scores of surgeries, only to be left with kidneys that don’t work. Now they’re hoping desperately for a transplant but have to wait patiently because he has no other relatives and the rare blood type AB negative, which only about one percent of all people have, so a tissue match is a long shot. They won’t take one of her kidneys, either, because on the chance she died in surgery he’d have nobody to care for him.

“Their story was troubling, and I couldn’t get it out of my head after that.

“So just before the pro race starts, they launch a kids 5K ride and have the pros ride along for the benefit of the crowd. As we’re rolling up to the kids, the first one we come to, who is well off the back of the pack and struggling mightily up a steep rise, is a slight boy on a three wheel bike. As we roll by him, one after another of the guys starts clapping loudly and cheering him on, and when I get alongside it’s the boy from up on the stage. His face is beet red and he’s riding for all he’s worth, willing his bike up that hill and refusing to give up. It strikes me he’s on a three-wheeler because his internal organs don’t work properly, and if he fell off a two-wheeler the damage might be fatal.

“By the time I go by him, my hands are stinging from clapping so hard and I can’t see for the tears pouring out of my eyes and streaming down my face. I didn’t bother looking, but surely there wasn’t a man among us who wasn’t doing the same thing.

“So I thought to myself, if that lad can do what he’s doing in the shape he’s in, by god I think I can suffer a little more doing my job. I’d never been so inspired in my life.

“From the moment the race got underway, I rode like a different man. It was the difference between riding fast and positively flying. When my legs hurt, rather than let up, I’d push even harder and curse them to show half the courage that boy did. We did seven laps around this hilly fifteen-mile course and I couldn’t even tell you where I went off the front, but at some point I did and half a dozen other riders followed along. Looking at their faces, it was an intimidating group I’d raced with before but never been able to hold onto for long. We worked together and kept ahead of the pack, and then in the seventh lap we came to a steep rise and I put in another hard effort and went off the front of our small group.

“If they stayed together I would have been caught, but some tried to catch me and others fell behind, and soon they were strung out and nobody had managed to get on my wheel. I put my head down and rode like never before, and I kept that lad in my mind and had to tilt my head from side-to-side to get the tears to blow out of my eyes.

“Before I knew it, I was atop the podium with a fancy winner’s jersey being handed to me and a man was giving me a check for fifteen thousand dollars, which was about a year’s pay and more money than I’d held in my life.

“They asked me to say a few words, but I had nothing worth saying. I just looked out at the crowd, feeling dumb and wishing I could get off the stage, and I saw the boy and his mom down front watching me. I wanted to tell everybody what an inspiration the lad’s story had been, and I knew that would be the proper thing to say, but that seemed a half measure, at best.

“Finally, I leaned toward the microphone and asked if they could be brought back up.

“As if words of magic, people moved aside and ushered them forward. When they were alongside me I asked for a pen and someone provided one, and I autographed both items I’d received, and said the jersey belongs to a braver athlete than myself and he should have the winner’s check also, and I gave him and his mum a hug and left the stage like I’d wanted to earlier.”

He stopped and took a sip of his Dos Equis as the pleasant lady picked the napkin from beneath her drink glass and dabbed her tear-filled eyes with it, then took a long drink and gazed out toward the horizon, speechless for the time.

“That was a fine thing you did,” she said finally. “I can imagine where the scar comes in.”

“Right. So directly after that race the coach for a European team in fact approached me, and he asked me to come over to their training camp and see if I could earn a place on the roster. Later that afternoon a plane ticket to Milan was delivered to my hotel. We had three more races to do, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and then I’d be leaving for Italy directly from Philadelphia on Monday. They would host me for a week of riding with the group, and afterward we’d discuss whether it made sense for me to stay longer. I thought that even if it went poorly, at least I saved myself from the long van ride back to Colorado.”

“Perhaps this was a karmic reward for your kindness.”

“Who can say?“ He continued. “All I know is the next three days I rode incredibly well, and each night I sat in my hotel room feeling worse – as if I didn’t deserve such good fortune.

“On Sunday, after the final race, I went out for a ride by myself. I was gone for a couple of hours, just riding and thinking, trying to figure out why I couldn’t be happy now. Deep down I already knew the answer, but couldn’t come to grips with what needed to be done about it.

“On Monday morning I left my bike with the team mechanics and took a cab to the airport carrying my duffel bag of clothes and riding accessories. I arrived hours early for my flight and sat in the terminal mostly staring at the ticket in my hand, knowing with increasing certainty as each minute ticked past that I wouldn’t be going.

“Finally the boarding process began and I let go of the chance I had, and tossed the ticket in the rubbish and left.”

“To the hospital, I presume?”

“Directly. They drew blood and confirmed later that day that I was suitable. It was the boy’s AB negative blood. That was my type also. I always wear a medical tag to let emergency crews know I have this rare blood so they won’t fill me with the wrong kind if I get in an accident.”

“So you donated a kidney?”

“I did. They removed a rib - standard procedure, mind - to get to it, and after about six hours of cutting and sewing, rolled me to post op to recuperate.”

“Bet that put a damper on your season.”

“Yeah, I got out a week later and had to recover for three more before I could get back to training. That didn’t leave many opportunities to compete that year.”

“Did it work?”

“Perfectly,” he said, as a smile broadened across his face. “It’s been several years but I still talk to them almost weekly, and whenever I’m on the East Coast we visit together. They’re like family. Even closer, I suppose.”

“And all this made you a better rider?”

“Certainly. I learned about real pain, and what’s important, and what you can do if really want something, like to get to the top of a hill even when your body doesn’t work anymore. That boy taught me how to be tough, and how to be willing to suffer for what you want. I never rode weakly after that day.”

“So I almost dread asking, but how’d you get all beat up this time?” She asked, glancing again at the various wraps and bandages.

“Oh, now that a dreadful story,” he responded, and as he did the smile melted from his face, and the glint in his eyes seemed to dull before hers, and she became even more intrigued but at the same time not sure she was strong enough to wrestle with whatever drama it might hold.

Chapter 1

“At seventy kilometers an hour there’s an intense buzz generated by thin rubber tires pumped with over a hundred pounds of air flying over hard pavement, and it resonates through your hands, feet, and ass as vibrations flow up through the seat, pedals, and handlebars, and your vision distorts as your eyes water and dry out at the same time as violent eddies of wind form and render sunglasses useless in shielding you from them, and your hearing is bombarded and disabled by the rumble of wind created by a snaking train of bikes boring rapidly through a sea of otherwise placid air.

“It’s unsettling enough when there’s just the road and the wind, but a whole different matter when you’re hunched over a fifteen pound machine riding inches from any number of riders you don’t know well and rarely or never ridden with, and some who just aren’t good at high speed descents.

“For a brief period of time you’re living at the mercy of a blown tire, a busted chain, potholes, tree branches, water and slippery stuff on the road, tar that got soft and sticky, or the briefest of contact with another bike. That’s a short list of things that will almost always cause a spill. Most of the time, it happens for no clear reason at all. You ride, you fall; it’s just a part of the sport. If it’s not too bad, you get up and start riding again, hoping nothing’s wrong with the bike. You might not know how much your body’s banged up until the adrenaline stops flowing through your veins, but soon enough you figure it out.”

Shamus took a drink from his beer, momentarily distracting himself from further thoughts of countless spills that had shredded his body and left him bleeding and oozing throughout the night, defiling his bed linens and making it impossible to sleep for the sharp pains that coursed through him whenever he rolled over, as if he were being abraded anew.

He picked up again. “That day we were to ride ninety miles over five mountain summits in Northern Spain, just a few kilometers south of France. Approaching the final climb I accelerated as hard as I could go and several alert riders jumped in behind me. Looking back, we saw that we’d gotten a small gap on the main group.

“From the base of climb to the Col de Peyresourde, the road twisted upward for twelve kilometers through an endless series of hairpins turns, ascending almost a mile before we reached the crest. We rode an excruciating pace, faster than any of us could keep up for long, hoping the main group would choose not to chase. I’m sure they looked at the pace we were riding and assumed we’d just burn up, and they’d reel us back in. So, despite that we’d collected some strong riders in our little group, there wasn’t an immediate effort by the pack to close down our breakaway.

“Unfortunately for them, by the time we got to the top we’d gained five minutes’ advantage and there was a growing possibility we could keep the lead if we continued to work together. We had good incentive to do that, since one of us stood a chance to win the day’s stage, and all of us would move higher in the overall rankings by putting time on riders in the main group.

“Finally we rolled beneath the red banner indicating we’d reached the top of the pass, and every one of us was grateful for the relief because our bodies had gone so deep into the red zone to climb so fast, and now there was time to recover. Fans along the sides of the road held out sections of newspaper and each of us grabbed handfuls as we passed by and stuffed it in a wad inside our jerseys to gain some protection against the wind cooling our sweat-drenched bodies and stiffening our muscles after a hard day’s ride.

“While the work was certainly easier going down the mountain, there was little chance to relax since these long twisty descents required absolute concentration. Looking to maintain our advantage, we pushed the limits of safety as we careened down the Pyrenees along a two-lane blacktop with rugged mountainside to our right, and only blue sky off to our left.

“I was at the front riding as fast as I could find the courage to go, and actually feeling pretty comfortable working around the twists and turns. About half way down the mountainside we came around a sweeping turn with a long, straight stretch after it, so I hammered the pedals to gather speed.

“Things went to shit almost immediately. I mean, one instant I was riding, and the next I wasn’t. I don’t even remember going down; just the crush of my body smashing into the pavement, elbow, shoulder and hip hitting first and hardest, and then an eternity as I slid over the asphalt, fabric and skin being ripped away as I flailed arms and legs to get balance. All I could think about was what was in my path — a curb, a parked car, the edge of a cliff; God only knew.

“Even As I skidded I could hear shouts of ‘rider down!’ as guys tried to warn one another. Others swore because they knew they were going down as well. Once a rider up front crashes it tends to cause a melee as people hit their brakes or swerve and inevitably run into others, and if it’s a large group and they’re going fast, it quickly becomes chaos.

“This was horrible.

“At the edge of the road I ran into a steel post supporting a guardrail and was probably still doing thirty when my body folded around it. The stop was so abrupt I thought for sure the life had been flung from my body, but the excruciating pain of busted ribs and damaged organs informed me otherwise, and left me struggling to breathe. Around me others were colliding, falling, smashing and sliding, and the mountainside rang with the sounds of machines and bones breaking, and of agony.

“A spectator pulled me away from the I-beam I’d smashed into, so I was able to start breathing again. That was welcome relief. Just a few feet beyond, the mountain dropped off for hundreds of feet, so as much as it hurt taking a metal post to the gut, I’d have been dead without it.

“My mind quickly went into shock, so I wasn’t registering as much pain as I would later when the fog lifted, and I wasn’t thinking about much beyond forcing my body to continue breathing. But as I laid there waiting for medical help, I noticed how everything had gotten eerily quiet. No more sounds of bikes, riders weren’t talking or shouting or crying anymore, and even the spectators were hushed. Silence confirmed that terrible things had happened, and very likely somewhere among us lay a dead man.

“Eventually I heard sirens in the distance, and passed out.”

Shamus paused from recounting his memories. He glanced shyly at the lady sitting next to him who had become spellbound by his story; unaware her mouth had gone agape as she’d listened. He didn’t mind having an attentive audience. As he paused to catch his breath, she finally managed to interject the only coherent thought she’d assembled.

“You’ve got to be crazy doing that for a living,” she said.

He could find few grounds for argument with that, Shamus thought.

There was no way to miss the cycling uniform he wore, nor the fancy bicycle perched nearby. The bike was black and looked more or less like the ones her kids had ridden as they’d grown. One didn’t have to be an expert to tell that it was a lot more expensive, though. This one sported the word Trek painted in large red script on the frame. She knew enough to recognize this brand name. On another part, in oranges and blues of the same hue as the shorts and jersey worn by the young man, the words Continental Tire prominently highlighted the Team’s corporate sponsor.

“I always thought bike racing was the only thing I wanted to do, but I’m not so sure any more,” Shamus responded. The anxiety he felt with his profession, though, wasn’t the result of pain and suffering from such falls.

“So you came down here to think it over?” She asked.

“I suppose I did, yeah. After the accident I awoke to find myself wired up, splinted, stitched, and incredibly uncomfortable in a dreary hospital ward somewhere in France. I was in there for more than a week, and with the team out on the road, I certainly wasn’t getting many visitors — which left me listening to my IPod, mostly. When Jimmy Buffett played, I’d see myself waking up on a sunny beach in Mexico with this whole situation behind me. I knew that when I got out I wasn’t going to be doing any more racing this season, so as soon as I was released I flew straight to Mexico.”

“How long do you plan to stay in Cabo?” She asked.

“When my credit card’s tapped I’ll probably head back for training camp in Europe, to prepare for next season. If I haven’t lost my nerve,” Shamus answered honestly.

She started to ask another question then hesitated.

“Well, I’m enthralled by your story but you probably came here to look at the pretty girls on the beach, and not gab with some old lady at the bar.”

Shamus thought to himself that he did find the little bar on the sand a nice place to watch the scenery, and the scenery did wonders to take his mind off his problems. He’d also learned venturing any farther onto the beach attracted a swarm of peddlers hawking all sorts of paraphernalia he had no interest in. Nonetheless, it occurred to him that he was enjoying having someone to talk to even more than he would watching bikinis saunter up and down the beach.

He hadn’t really spoken to anyone in weeks, aside from occasional calls from the team to check how he was recuperating. As a professional racer, Shamus spent nine months traveling. Surrounded by team and staff, it was never lonely. To the contrary, one had to develop a thick skin about the utter lack of privacy, or find another way to make a living. However, the Gypsy life made it difficult to start or maintain a social life. Separated from the team, he had few people to connect with, and hardly knew what to do with himself. Now, it was refreshing to have a simple conversation with someone from outside his world, even if the topic invariably wound itself back to his sport.

“Honestly, I don’t mind,” he responded. “I’m Shamus McDonough. By way of Ireland, I hadn’t given it away.”

“Sheila Brown-Cahill,” she said, offering her hand.

She was entranced by the handsome young man who appeared lean beyond what one should be, and his adventurous tale and the comely Irish accent with which he told it. She found it melodic, and somehow it made the story deeper and more despairing and legitimate than if it were told otherwise.

“I’m here with my husband who has an important business meeting out on the golf course, she said with obvious sarcasm, but without any bite to her words. His boss brings a group here every year as a pat on the back while us trailing spouses get sent off for mud baths at the spa. I don’t need to come all the way down here to get slathered with dirt and hosed off with a bunch of women I don’t know, so I mostly do my own thing. I sell real estate, by the way,” She said.

She handed him a business card with her picture in the corner.

Shamus scanned it casually; Million Dollar Club was stamped prominently across the face of it, suggesting she was at least somewhat successful at doing her own thing. He noted her office address in Phoenix, Arizona; possibly another reason she wasn’t absolutely giddy about vacationing in sunny Mexico, notwithstanding the mud baths.

“And don’t worry about me hitting on you. I’ve got a son about your age who moved back in with us after he finished college, and the last thing I need is another one around,” she said with a hearty laugh.

Shamus was disarmed by her good nature. He hoped she might stay a bit longer, as it felt good to talk with someone who had no stake in his world, and, deep down, he responded warmly to having, if just for a moment, a maternal figure around. It was a novelty, and a pleasant one, he found. It hadn’t been lost on him that his arrival in his parent’s lives had been unintended. He’d solved that puzzle at a very early age. So as he grew up, they did their own thing and largely left him to his. Those being the cards he was dealt, he played them. Taking full advantage of his independence, once he’d gotten hold of a set of wheels, he’d gone like a shot.

He’d said he didn’t mind talking to her, and Sheila wasn’t going to let him have a chance to reconsider. She picked up where they’d left off.

“My husband hasn’t even gotten to the first tee yet and this is a lot more interesting than whatever else I’d be doing, she said. If I may say so, aside from what you’ve described as a good chance of getting seriously hurt every time you go to work, am I correct in sensing you that you may be a bit disillusioned about racing?”

Shamus didn’t answer immediately, and though the topic wasn’t one to warm to, he smiled nevertheless – not at the question itself, but marveling at her power of observation. He didn’t think he’d exactly worn his heart on his sleeve or denounced his profession, but certainly he’d found himself questioning it more seriously since he’d disembarked on his Mexican Sabbatical.

“I’m debating whether my last race was my last race, to tell the truth. Certainly the crash is on my mind, but that’s not the issue, really.”

“He deliberated whether to go any further. There were plenty of reasons not to, but he found that he didn’t care so much about them anymore. The crash had changed his body temporarily, but most of the wounds would heal, and the damage would fade until old age set in and reminded him again of each abuse he’d withstood in the pursuit of his passion. More significantly, though, the crash seemed to alter his values and the way he thought about what he did, and what that did, in turn, to those around him. He’d seen first hand that few things actually happened to one person without directly affecting others, sometimes tragically. More than ever before, he felt responsibility for his mistakes, and was beginning to understand that some mistakes cause damage that doesn’t heal.”

He thought he might continue the conversation a bit further.

“What I’ve been thinking about, is that, well, it’s not exactly a secret that many cyclists use drugs to help their performance, because there’s a lot of pressure to win by all means, even if that means cheating. And one has to question whether they’re doing the right thing by working in that environment, or whether they shouldn’t find a more proper way to earn a living.”

Once said, he’d teed the topic considered his sport’s Thin Blue Line; a secret to nobody inside, but never to be spoken of with others.

Sheila thought for a moment before responding.

“I have to admit I haven’t paid much attention to your sport,” she said. “But that seems pretty commonplace in many sports, doesn’t it? I mean, there’s the whole Barry Bonds thing, and then those Olympic sprinters Ben Johnson and Jackie Joyner – they were probably before your time, I guess – and God only knows how all those football and basketball stars get as big as they do. If you believe what you hear on the news, they’re all started on testosterone and animal hormones by the time they get to high school,” she finished.

“Yeah, well, cycling’s been around as a competitive sport for a long time, and cyclists come from all over, so there are different views of what’s acceptable training and what’s not, he responded. For the first eighty or ninety years the Tour de France – our Superbowl, if you will – was seen as so physically demanding it was necessary for riders to be on drugs. Recently the tide’s turned and suddenly we’re not supposed to doing it anymore, but you have a hard time winning if you don’t, because others still do. So it’s cat-and-mouse, with labs continually getting more effective, and athletes becoming more creative about how to get away with it. A lot of people profit from selling these drugs to us. It’s a dirty racket, and it eats athletes up and spits them out again. So you’re constantly reassessing whether to keep living in that world, or get out altogether. We all think about it.”

Sheila listened patiently. Raising kids had gotten her used to heart-to-hearts. She knew the groundrules: Be prepared to hear things you wish you hadn’t; don’t judge; offer no quick answers; let them talk as long as they need to, and cry when they want to; and, when you guide, guide gently.

“Sounds like there’s a lot of pressure to make bad choices,” she opened.

“You bet,” he responded quickly, shaking his head as he did. “Most of us barely get by, and only a couple hundred riders in the world make it to the top levels. To keep your job you’ve got to be in shape all the time, win contests to attract attention to the team sponsor, and be lucky enough to avoid getting sick or hurt. It takes most guys till they’re twenty-five or so to get strong enough to ride at that level, and then you peak by your early thirties. By thirty-five you’re looking for a new career.

“If you’re really talented, you can make a quarter million to a half million dollars a year, plus some sponsorship money. But there are strings attached. We ride on contracts good for one season or maybe two, at most, so if we have bad results it can be over very quickly. And if we get hurt, it’s only three months’ pay and the team cuts us off.

“So I ride my legs off and all the time I’m wondering who’s getting a few percentage points of advantage from stuff they’re taking that I’m not. You see someone who’s always been weaker in the mountains breeze by you on a hard climb, and you’re thinking there’s only one way he could be able do that now, and you wonder how you can compete without that edge. Then there are coaches and trainers and team helpers and doctors around you, telling you how you need to perform, and what you might be able to do if you were more dedicated, and the message is pretty clear.”

Sheila was dying to ask Shamus whether he’d gotten involved in doping, whether the guilt of doing so was at the heart of his discontent, but feared doing so would only end the conversation.

“And my situation on the team isn’t clear at the moment,” he continued. “My contract is up next season and usually by this point I’d have an offer in hand if they wanted me back. Some of my mates already do. When they selected me for the Tour de France I was hoping to show some good performance and cement my spot. I’d gotten off to a great start including a top ten finish in the prologue, and was helping others in sprints and climbs. I’d been having a really strong ride right up to the moment I went down,” Shamus explained.

“And the team holds it against you that you crashed?” Sheila asked.

“They would in any case; it’s a business and it’s about performance. In my case its far more damning because of what happened to Gerard, he said, and saw a look on her face that said the name didn’t register with her.”

He explained further. “Gerard Jouyet, a Frenchman who was our team leader, was one of the top picks to possibly win the Tour. Up to the time I crashed, he’d been doing quite well also, and all of France was excited to have one of their own as a legitimate contender. Every day his face was on the front page of Le Monde, and our whole team was arranged to help him win. Then I went and ruined everything.”

“He couldn’t go on without you?” Sheila asked.

“You see,” he responded, “the breakaway happened because our team had gone to the front of the peleton and accelerated like hell. We each took turns riding as hard as we could at the front of the group, shielding one another from the wind. One man works at his maximum while the others recuperate and wait their turn. When the one on front decides when he needs to rotate off, he moves aside and lets the group power past him, and jumps in behind the last rider going by. If you go like this hard enough, eventually there will be riders who cannot keep up the pace, and they’ll get dropped off the back.

“Heading up toward Peyresourd, a group of us began such a rotation and kept working hard at it until most of the riders in the main group had dropped off. Then we kept going until even riders from our own team were blowing up, as well. It wasn’t long before there were only one or two guys from a few teams remaining in our breakaway group – and no other team had their top man in the breakaway, except us. I’d managed to get the breakaway going and stay with it, and Gerard followed me the whole time. With only ten kilometers left to the finish, a five minute lead over the main group, and a dozen or so riders who were all working well and taking hard pulls at the front, we were in perfect position not only to win the day, but possibly to give Gerard so much time advantage he’d have the Tour largely won before we’d hit the halfway point.”

“So when you crashed, did he go down also?” Sheila asked, trying to anticipate where this story would unfold.

“In a manner of speaking,” he said darkly. “I didn’t find out what happened until I woke up in the hospital. Gerard had been following only inches from my back tire, taking advantage to draft close behind me and stay out of the wind. He was counting on me to keep us safe. When I went down, he tried to swerve around instead of running over me. At that speed though, there isn’t any margin for error, and swerving like he did sent him straight into the barrier at full speed. Sitting up so high on a bike, you don’t stop like when a car when you hit a rail, you’re sent cartwheeling over it. It’s not uncommon for a rider to flip over a barrier with the bike still clipped to his feet, and then run back up onto the road and get riding again. Where we were, though, there was simply nothing to land on on the other side. It was just blue sky for a long way down, and Gerard died on that mountainside. Everything had occurred so fast that I didn’t even see him go by me. My last recollection was that things had gotten absolutely still, and I knew something incredibly grave had occurred. In this case, it wasn’t just a team tragedy or a tragedy for the Tour, but a national tragedy, and I’d caused it.”

“Good lord,” was all Sheila could say. “Dos mas aqui, por favor,” she mumbled to the brown man behind the counter. They needed more to drink, and fast.